For the first time in almost three years, the open source BIND Domain Name System (DNS) server, which translates and routes IP addresses into domain names, is getting a key point upgrade.

The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), which oversees the development of BIND and offers commercial support services for it, claims that BIND 9.4 has significant performance increases over its predecessor version 9.3, which was released in April 2004.

One of the new features that help make BIND 9.4 faster is support for DLZ (dynamically loaded zones). DLZ is intended to reduce both startup time and memory usage by dynamically storing and loading DNS zone data.

Bind 9.4 also includes an additional section caching framework, which provides an internal cache for improved response performance. There are also additional memory leakage checks built into BIND to keep memory usage in line.

The performance improvements in version 9.4 lead to faster query response times, which ultimately means a faster Internet for its millions of users.

When the last version of BIND was released IPv6, the next-generation IP protocol, wasn't as big a concern as it is now.

"BIND 9.4 has a number of performance improvements and protocols tuning which will incrementally improve the IPv6 performance for those that deploy it," ISC president Paul Vixie explained to internetnews.com.com.

Vixie attributed the three-year gap between the release of BIND 9.3 and 9.4 to developments in the IETF community.

"As the protocol reference implementation, it didn't make sense to arbitrarily cut off a release until it was complete," Vixie said.

Moving forward, the key challenge facing Vixie and his developers will be the development of BIND 10, which they've already started work on.

"The focus of BIND 10 will be modularity, cluster-ability, better integration with user workflow and ease of customization," Vixie said.